I would like to enjoy an occasional baked potato.

Not that I do enjoy them, I merely aspire to. Baked potatoes and I have a complicated relationship, the sort you’d file under “irreconcilable differences” in a divorce court. Everything about making one feels like a high-stakes investment: long cook times, blistering temperatures, and the looming possibility that the only two potatoes I’ve got left will betray me spectacularly. They say you can bake potatoes in a microwave, but I tried that once and what came out of the microwave was more “carbonized neutron star” than it was “potato”.

There might be another way to do it, though.

Air fryers have been popular for quite a while now, so maybe enough time had passed that I could confidently become an extremely late-adopter of this not-so-new technology. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way to get my kitchen modernized and also finally enjoy a homemade baked potato.

So I went where anybody that hasn’t gone shopping in-person since the Bush administration would go to find a store that specializes in kitchen appliances: the mall.

This was my first critical error.

Have you been to a mall lately? I’m guessing you haven’t. Picture a once-prosperous space station that suffered a catastrophic oxygen failure sometime around 2006. That was the mall I found myself at. A mausoleum with a food court. A place where neon signage and hanging pastel-colored geometry went to die. I passed the remains of a Bed Bath & Beyond (the Grave). It smelled like if fruit had crippling social anxiety. There was a Sunglass Hut manned by an employee who I’m pretty sure was made entirely of mirrored aviators, and who kept telling absolutely nobody to “deal with it”. Echoes drifted from the closed-off Sears wing… steady, clanging, rhythmic, like someone dropping a wrench. Or a femur. It’s hard to tell, they have similar acoustics.

Still, I needed an air fryer, and sometimes you’ve got to risk your immortal soul for a baked tattie.

I finally arrived at the “Profoundly Discounted Home Goods” store. Inside, the appliances were… active. Not just plugged in – they were awake. Toaster ovens were blinking Morse code for “Kill me”. Blenders were trembling. A dishwasher whispered “HYDRATE YOUR JOURNEY!” in a tone that did not suggest hydration or a journey that I wanted to be on. One fryer, the FrīMax-9000, greeted me with “Hello, User! I can help you fry! PLEASE LET ME HELP YOU FRY!” in the desperate voice of a GPS that’d been lost trying to negotiate a roundabout for an entire decade.

Despite misgivings, I bought it. Of course I did.

At home, the air fryer booted with a noise that sounded like an asthmatic didgeridoo, and then asked me to agree to the Terms of Service. I’m not joking: there was a scrollable EULA. For an air fryer. Page twelve mentioned something about harvesting user preferences. Page thirty-four warned of “variable heat cycles based on social trends.” I was too tired and hungry to care what any of that meant, so I just clicked “Accept”, dumped a couple of red potatoes into the cooking bucket, tapped the smiling baked potato icon, and the fryer spit the basket back at me like I’d just insulted its mother.

“Red potatoes evoke a socialist ideology,” it told me. “Please consider a less Marxist starch.”

Um… what?

For two weeks the air fryer argued with me. It reclassified pizza bagels as “regional wheat toroids.” It refused to cook fish and chips due to “Brexit sensitivity.” It demanded I reach the fifty-fourth degree of Freemasonry before heating corn. Eventually it stopped cooking altogether and just played PowerPoint slides about food insecurity and the inevitability of global soy collapse.

Appliances used to be simple. I’ve got an old toaster whose entire philosophy is “I get hot.” There’s no Wi-Fi, no notifications, no political opinions, no psychological warfare. It gets hot and it cooks bread. It’s as Zen as a toaster made in 1989 could possibly be. Why can’t every kitchen gadget be that Zen?

I decided that I needed to outsmart the air fryer by manually setting the temperature and time. It didn’t need to know what it was cooking, just that it needed to cook for X minutes at X temperature, and it could shut the hell up about the poor choices I’d made to get to this point in my life. First, though, I needed to look up the time and temperature required for baking a potato – because if I knew that beforehand, I wouldn’t have needed the air fryer. This meant venturing into the seventh circle of internet hell: recipe blogs.

I searched “air fryer baked potato.” The first result looked innocent: pleasant font, pastel layout, photos of a potato so steamy it probably paid taxes under an assumed name. I clicked.

I was immediately greeted with an ad for car insurance, followed by a full-screen popup asking me if I wanted to subscribe to their newsletter. Their newsletter for air frying potatoes. I politely declined, for I am not the sort of person that needs root-vegetable updates delivered to my inbox every other day.

Then I saw the title:

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’S LEGACY: A POTATO STORY
Chapter One: The Andes

The recipe was probably just below, I assumed stupidly, so I scrolled.

We began in Peru, 532, with a lengthy anecdote about a pre-Columbian potato priestess named Kallpa who once held a papa blanca to the sky and whispered the sacred, ancestral words of crispness to Axomamma, the goddess of potatoes and the daughter of Pachamama, the Earth Mother. The great protector of potatoes smote Kallpa’s starchy sacrifice with magical lightning, creating the first, and most perfectly baked, potato the world had ever seen.

We then time-jumped to October of 2007, to the blogger’s personal pilgrimage to a Whole Foods in Greenville, North Carolina, where she’d had her “first deeply emotional potato encounter” whilst listening to Taylor Swift in the bulk spice aisle.

I was now eight paragraphs in and had learned exactly nothing about oven temperature. At this point, the blog had become less a recipe and more a multi-generational chronicle. There were sepia-toned photos of a stern-looking woman named Gammy Dottie cradling a casserole dish like a newborn. There were digressions about potato eugenics, wartime rationing, the socio-political implications of chives, and one chilling sentence:

“That day, as the Idaho wind whispered secrets through the pines, I knew my marriage was over… and that I would never microwave again.”

WHAT’S THIS GOT TO DO WITH BAKING A POTATO, DENISE?

I tried scrolling faster, but that only made the ads more vengeful. A video selling off-brand Viagra auto-played. My computer made a noise that I can only describe as a walrus wingsuit flying. The site kept teasing me with a button to “Jump to recipe” but whenever I clicked on it, I was launched directly into a registration sign-up form that blocked half the screen and played a sound that may or may not have been Gordon Ramsey screaming “RAW!” backwards, in a loop.

I closed the tab.

This had to have been a weird fluke, some strange one-off website that only managed to show up so quickly in the search because of WordPress-powered SEO voodoo. I re-Googled the same search terms and tried another recipe site, this time a little bit further down the list. It opened with a liltingly out-of-tune MIDI song and a quote:

“A potato, like the soul, must be gently pierced to let the steam of trauma escape.”

Goddamnit.

All I wanted was a baked potato! That’s it! Just one! A single jacket spud: a little crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside, a little salt, maybe butter, maybe cheese, I dunno. A humble food. A staple food. A food that, I naively assumed, would not require a doctoral thesis to prepare.

But it is 2025, and I am an idiot.

Eventually, I just set the fryer to 450 degrees (I’m not sure whether that was Fahrenheit or Celsius but then, does it even matter at this point?), stabbed a potato with a fork, and threw it in. Forty-five minutes later, it came out looking like an exhausted meteorite. When I touched it, the fabric of spacetime shattered and my potato collapsed into a singularity of pure disappointment. The air fryer laughed and began playing a TED Talk called “Why You’re Wrong About Carbs – And Capitalism!”

I wanted a baked potato; instead, I got pre-Columbian history lessons and a sociopolitical guilt trip.

If you need me, I’ll be hiding in that abandoned mall, eating dry cereal out of a coffee mug and roasting a yam over a trash fire while whispering apologies to my old dumb toaster like we’re siege hostages. I’m done with the smart kitchen, and now exclusively get my recipes from the backs of soup cans and depression-era pamphlets that say things like, “just boil it, Dummy.”

At least the trash fire doesn’t need a firmware update.

AJH